Abstract

Wireless communication increasingly is becoming the first choice link to enter into the global information society. It is an essential part of broadband communication networks, due to its capacity to cover the end-user domain, outdoors or indoors. The use of mobile phones and broadband has already exceeded the one of the fixed telephones and has caused tremendous changes in peoples life, as not only to be recognised in the current political overthrows. The all-around presence of wireless communication links combined with functions that support mobility will make a roaming person-bound communication network possible in the near future. This idea of a personal network, in which a user has his own communication environment available everywhere, necessitates immense numbers of radio access points to maintain the wireless links and support mobility. The progress towards “all-around wireless” needs budget and easily maintainable radio access points, with simplified signal processing and consolidation of the radio network functions in a central station. The RF energy consumption in mobile base stations is one of the main problems in the wireless communication system, which has led to the worldwide research in so called green communication, which offers an environmentally friendly and cost-effective solution. In order to extend networks and mobility support, the simplification of antenna stations and broadband communication capacity becomes an increasingly urgent demand, also the extension of the wireless signal transmission distance to consolidate the signal processing in a centralised site. Radio-over-Fibre technology (RoF) was considered and found to be the most promising solution to achieve effective delivery of wireless and baseband signals, also to reduce RF energy consumption. The overall aim of this research project was to simulate the transmission of wireless and baseband RF signals via fibre for a long distance in high quality, consuming a low-power budget. Therefore, this thesis demonstrated a green radio communication network and the advantage of transmitting signals via fibre rather than via air. The contributions of this research work were described in the follows: Firstly, a comparison of the power consumption in WiMAX via air and fibre is presented. As shown in the simulation results, the power budget for the transmission of 64 QAM WiMAX IEEE 802.16-2005 via air for a distance of 5km lies at -189.67 dB, whereas for the transmission via RoF for a distance of 140km, the power consumption ranges at 65dB. Through the deployment of a triple symmetrical compensator technique, consisting of SMF, DCF and FBG, the transmission distance of the 54 Mbps WiMAX signal can be increased to 410km without increasing the power budget of 65dB. An amendment of the triple compensator technique to SMF, DCF and CFBG allows a 120Mbps WiMAX signal transmission with a clear RF spectrum of 3.5 GHz and constellation diagram over a fibre length of 792km using a power budget of 192dB. Secondly, the thesis demonstrates a simulation setup for the deployment of more than one wireless system, namely 64 QAM WiMAX IEEE 802.16-2005 and LTE, for a data bit rate of 1Gbps via Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) RoF over a transmission distance of 1800km. The RoF system includes two triple symmetrical compensator techniques - DCF, SMF, and CFBG - to obtain a large bandwidth, power budget of 393.6dB and a high signal quality for the long transmission distance. Finally, the thesis proposed a high data bit rate and energy efficient simulation architecture, applying a passive optical component for a transmission span up to 600km. A Gigabit Optical Passive Network (GPON) based on RoF downlink 2.5 Gbps and uplink 1.25Gbps is employed to carry LTE and WiMAX, also 18 digital channels by utilising Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM). The setup achieved high data speed, a low-power budget of 151.2dB, and an increased service length of up to 600km.